Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (41 page)

Like their predecessors, the three IS hackers had started out in the Melbourne BBS scene. Mendax met Trax on Electric Dreams in about 1988, and Prime Suspect on Megaworks, where he used the handle Control Reset, not long after that. When he set up his own BBS at his home in Tecoma, a hilly suburb so far out of Melbourne that it was practically in forest, he invited both hackers to visit ‘A Cute Paranoia’ whenever they could get through on the single phone line.

Visiting on Mendax’s BBS suited both hackers, for it was more private than other BBSes. Eventually they exchanged home telephone numbers, but only to talk modem-to-modem. For months, they would ring each other up and type on their computer screens to each other--never having heard the sound of the other person’s voice. Finally, late in 1990, the nineteen-year-old Mendax called up the 24-year-old Trax for a voice chat. In early 1991, Mendax and Prime Suspect, aged seventeen, also began speaking in voice on the phone.

Trax seemed slightly eccentric, and possibly suffered from some sort of anxiety disorder. He refused to travel to the city, and he once made reference to seeing a psychiatrist. But Mendax usually found the most interesting people were a little unusual, and Trax was both.

Mendax and Trax discovered they had a few things in common. Both came from poor but educated families, and both lived in the outer suburbs.

However, they had very different childhoods.

Trax’s parents migrated to Australia from Europe. Both his father, a retired computer technician, and his mother spoke with a German accent. Trax’s father was very much the head of the household, and Trax was his only son.

By contrast, by the time he was fifteen Mendax had lived in a dozen different places including Perth, Magnetic Island, Brisbane, Townsville, Sydney, the Adelaide Hills, and a string of coastal towns in northern New South Wales and Western Australia. In fifteen years he had enrolled in at least as many different schools.

His mother had left her Queensland home at age seventeen, after saving enough money from selling her paintings to buy a motorcycle, a tent and a road map of Australia. Waving goodbye to her stunned parents, both academics, she rode off into the sunset. Some 2000 kilometres later, she arrived in Sydney and joined the thriving counter-culture community. She worked as an artist and fell in love with a rebellious young man she met at an anti-Vietnam demonstration.

Within a year of Mendax’s birth, his mother’s relationship with his father had ended. When Mendax was two, she married a fellow artist.

What followed was many turbulent years, moving from town to town as his parents explored the ’70s left-wing, bohemian subculture. As a boy, he was surrounded by artists. His stepfather staged and directed plays and his mother did make-up, costume and set design.

One night in Adelaide, when Mendax was about four, his mother and a friend were returning from a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. The friend claimed to have scientific evidence that the British had conducted high-yield, above-ground nuclear tests at Maralinga, a desert area in north-west South Australia.

A 1984 Royal Commission subsequently revealed that between 1953 and 1963 the British government had tested nuclear bombs at the site, forcing more than 5000 Aborigines from their native lands. In December 1993, after years of stalling, the British government agreed to pay

[sterling]20 million toward cleaning up the more than 200 square kilometres of contaminated lands. Back in 1968, however, the Menzies government had signed away Britain’s responsibility to clean up the site. In the 1970s, the Australian government was still in denial about exactly what had happened at Maralinga.

As Mendax’s mother and her friend drove through an Adelaide suburb carrying early evidence of the Maralinga tragedy, they noticed they were being followed by an unmarked car. They tried to lose the tail, without success. The friend, nervous, said he had to get the data to an Adelaide journalist before the police could stop him. Mendax’s mother quickly slipped into a back lane and the friend leapt from the car. She drove off, taking the police tail with her.

The plain-clothed police pulled her over shortly after, searched her car and demanded to know where her friend had gone and what had occurred at the meeting. When she was less than helpful, one officer told her, ‘You have a child out at 2 in the morning. I think you should get out of politics, lady. It could be said you were an unfit mother’.

A few days after this thinly veiled threat, her friend showed up at Mendax’s mother’s house, covered in fading bruises. He said the police had beaten him up, then set him up by planting hash on him. ‘I’m getting out of politics,’ he announced.

However, she and her husband continued their involvement in theatre.

The young Mendax never dreamed of running away to join the circus--he already lived the life of a travelling minstrel. But although the actor-director was a good stepfather, he was also an alcoholic. Not long after Mendax’s ninth birthday, his parents separated and then divorced.

Mendax’s mother then entered a tempestuous relationship with an amateur musician. Mendax was frightened of the man, whom he considered a manipulative and violent psychopath. He had five different identities with plastic in his wallet to match. His whole background was a fabrication, right down to the country of his birth. When the relationship ended, the steady pattern of moving around the countryside began again, but this journey had a very different flavour from the earlier happy-go-lucky odyssey. This time, Mendax and his family were on the run from a physically abusive de facto. Finally, after hiding under assumed names on both sides of the continent, Mendax and his family settled on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Mendax left home at seventeen because he had received a tip-off about an impending raid. Mendax wiped his disks, burnt his print-outs and left. A week later, the Victorian CIB turned up and searched his room, but found nothing. He married his girlfriend, an intelligent but introverted and emotionally disturbed sixteen-year-old he had met through a mutual friend in a gifted children’s program. A year later they had a child.

Mendax made many of his friends through the computer community. He found Trax easy to talk to and they often spent up to five hours on a single phone call. Prime Suspect, on the other hand, was hard work on the phone.

Quiet and introverted, Prime Suspect always seemed to run out of conversation after five minutes. Mendax was himself naturally shy, so their talks were often filled with long silences. It wasn’t that Mendax didn’t like Prime Suspect, he did. By the time the three hackers met in person at Trax’s home in mid-1991, he considered Prime Suspect more than just a fellow hacker in the tight-knit IS circle.

Mendax considered him a friend.

Prime Suspect was a boy of veneers. To most of the world, he appeared to be a studious year 12 student bound for university from his upper middle-class grammar school. The all-boys school never expected less from its students and the possibility of attending a TAFE--a vocational college--was never discussed as an option. University was the object. Any student who failed to make it was quietly swept under the carpet like some sort of distasteful food dropping.

Prime Suspect’s own family situation did not mirror the veneer of respectability portrayed by his school. His father, a pharmacist, and his mother, a nurse, had been in the midst of an acrimonious divorce battle when his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In this bitter, antagonistic environment, the eight-year-old Prime Suspect was delivered to his father’s bedside in hospice for a rushed few moments to bid him farewell.

Through much of his childhood and adolescence, Prime Suspect’s mother remained bitter and angry about life, and particularly her impoverished financial situation. When he was eight, Prime Suspect’s older sister left home at sixteen, moved to Perth and refused to speak to her mother. In some ways, Prime Suspect felt he was expected be both child and de facto parent. All of which made him grow up faster in some ways, but remain immature in others.

Prime Suspect responded to the anger around him by retreating into his room. When he bought his first computer, an Apple IIe, at age thirteen he found it better company than any of his relatives. The computers at school didn’t hold much interest for him, since they weren’t connected to the outside world via modem. After reading about BBSes in the Apple Users’ Society newsletter, he saved up for his own modem and soon began connecting into various BBSes.

School did, however, provide the opportunity to rebel, albeit anonymously, and he conducted extensive pranking campaigns. Few teachers suspected the quiet, clean-cut boy and he was rarely caught.

Nature had endowed Prime Suspect with the face of utter innocence.

Tall and slender with brown curly hair, his true character only showed in the elfish grin which sometimes passed briefly across his baby face. Teachers told his mother he was underachieving compared to his level of intelligence, but had few complaints otherwise.

By year 10, he had become a serious hacker and was spending every available moment at his computer. Sometimes he skipped school, and he often handed assignments in late. He found it difficult to come up with ever more creative excuses and sometimes he imagined telling his teachers the truth. ‘Sorry I didn’t get that 2000-word paper done but I was knee-deep in NASA networks last night.’ The thought made him laugh.

He saw girls as a unwanted distraction from hacking. Sometimes, after he chatted with a girl at a party, his friends would later ask him why he hadn’t asked her out. Prime Suspect shrugged it off. The real reason was that he would rather get home to his computer, but he never discussed his hacking with anyone at school, not even with Mentat.

A friend of Force’s and occasional visitor to The Realm, Mentat was two years ahead of Prime Suspect at school and in general couldn’t be bothered talking to so junior a hacker as Prime Suspect. The younger hacker didn’t mind. He had witnessed other hackers’ indiscretions, wanted no part of them and was happy to keep his hacking life private.

Before the Realm bust, Phoenix rang him up once at 2 a.m. suggesting that he and Nom come over there and then. Woken by the call, Prime Suspect’s mother stood in the doorway to his bedroom, remonstrating with him for letting his ‘friends’ call at such a late hour. With Phoenix goading him in one ear, and his mother chewing him out in the other, Prime Suspect decided the whole thing was a bad idea. He said no thanks to Phoenix, and shut the door on his mother.

He did, however, talk to Powerspike on the phone once in a while. The older hacker’s highly irreverent attitude and Porky Pig laugh appealed to him. But other than those brief talks, Prime Suspect avoided talking on the phone to people outside the International Subversives, especially when he and Mendax moved into ever more sensitive military computers.

Using a program called Sycophant written by Mendax, the IS hackers had been conducting massive attacks on the US military. They divided up Sycophant on eight attack machines, often choosing university systems at places like the Australian National University or the University of Texas. They pointed the eight machines at the targets and fired.

Within six hours, the eight machines had assaulted thousands of computers. The hackers sometimes reaped 100000 accounts each night.

Using Sycophant, they essentially forced a cluster of Unix machines in a computer network to attack the entire Internet en masse.

And that was just the start of what they were into. They had been in so many sites they often couldn’t remember if they had actually hacked a particular computer. The places they could recall read like a Who’s Who of the American military-industrial complex. The US Airforce 7th Command Group Headquarters in the Pentagon. Stanford Research Institute in California. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia. Lockheed Martin’s Tactical Aircraft Systems Air Force Plant in Texas. Unisys Corporation in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA. Motorola Inc. in Illinois. TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, California. Alcoa in Pittsburgh.

Panasonic Corp in New Jersey. US Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station. Siemens-Nixdorf Information Systems in Massachusetts.

Securities Industry Automation Corp in New York. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Bell Communications Research, New Jersey. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, California.

As the IS hackers reached a level of sophistication beyond anything The Realm had achieved, they realised that progress carried considerable risk and began to withdraw completely from the broader Australian hacking community. Soon they had drawn a tight circle around themselves. They talked only to each other.

Watching the Realm hackers go down hadn’t deterred the next generation of hackers. It had only driven them further underground.

In the spring of 1991, Prime Suspect and Mendax began a race to get root on the US Department of Defense’s Network Information Center (NIC) computer--potentially the most important computer on the Internet.

As both hackers chatted amiably on-line one night, on a Melbourne University computer, Prime Suspect worked quietly in another screen to penetrate ns.nic.ddn.mil, a US Department of Defense system closely linked to NIC. He believed the sister system and NIC might ‘trust’

each other--a trust he could exploit to get into NIC. And NIC did everything.

NIC assigned domain names--the ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ at the end of an email address--for the entire Internet. NIC also controlled the US

military’s own internal defence data network, known as MILNET.

NIC also published the communication protocol standards for all of the Internet. Called RFCs (Request for Comments), these technical specifications allowed one computer on the Internet to talk to another. The Defense Data Network Security Bulletins, the US

Department of Defense’s equivalent of CERT advisories, came from the NIC machine.

Perhaps most importantly, NIC controlled the reverse look-up service on the Internet. Whenever someone connects to another site across the Internet, he or she typically types in the site name--say, ariel.unimelb.edu.au at the University of Melbourne. The computer then translates the alphabetical name into a numerical address--the IP